Not wishing to bother its hosts, Hemiola meditated on a favorite gavotte. The hexarch and Jedao had liked to dance to it, once upon a time. It remembered the way the hexarch had looked at Jedao, leading him around the walls of a room kept for that purpose.
“You’re humming,” Jedao said after a while. “Or playing something back, I can’t tell which. I guess when you can reproduce any sound at will, you can be an orchestra all by yourself.”
Hemiola flickered in embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize,” Jedao said. “It’s nice to know someone around here can hold a tune in a bucket. I used to... but it doesn’t matter.”
1491625 snickered.
“You used to what?” Hemiola said. If it recalled correctly, Jedao could find a beat but not much else.
“My mother taught me to sing some old songs, long ago and far away,” Jedao said. “Can’t do it anymore, though. Kel Command ruined me for that. Enough about me. I was wondering if you’d be willing to help me look through the records?”
It hesitated.
“Unless you’ve read them already?”
“Oh no,” it said. The hexarch himself had never reviewed the records, only updated them briskly during each visit. “I couldn’t. The hexarch wouldn’t—”
“The hexarch is in trouble,” Jedao said. “The problem is, he was also secretive as fuck. I need to figure out what he was so afraid of down all the years.”
A hundred questions flitted through Hemiola’s mind. Who would dare to threaten a hexarch? And why wasn’t Jedao with him? What had happened to disrupt the reliability of the mothdrives? “You don’t know where he is,” it said. It wasn’t a question.
“He’s been missing for nine years,” Jedao said. “The last time I saw him, he was making eyes at Kel Command. But that’s nothing new. I can only conclude—” He made an abortive gesture. “I was hoping for clues as to where he’s gone, or what he considers a threat. It’s a long shot, but since I knew about Tefos, I had to check here once I freed myself from certain obligations. To be honest, I thought I’d find him holed up here. But for all I know, he has more bases like Tefos scattered throughout the stars.”
“Surely the hexarch could only snatch so much time away from his duties,” Hemiola said.
Jedao smiled humorlessly. “You’d think.”
“Well,” Hemiola said, “I’ll help take a look.”
“Thank you,” Jedao said. “1491625, I’m going to divert one of the subdisplays and hope there isn’t anything hideously distracting in there. Or, foxes help us, that the data format is so obsolete that it crashes the grid, or some damn thing.”
“You just had to make this whole process more nerve-racking, didn’t you,” 1491625 said.
Jedao slid the data solid into a reader slot. “Well, there’s the index,” he said. “It’s compressed, not encrypted. To be frank, I wish it had been. I’d feel safer. Here’s the access key, Hemiola—”
Hemiola received it from the grid. The entire set of records consisted of lowest-denominator text-plus-image files.
“That file format is unspeakably old,” Jedao said. “Kujen was a stickler for backwards compatibility. Still, it means we can read the records without trouble. I never thought I’d be grateful for his obsessive insistence on standardized formats.”
Hemiola was only halfway paying attention to this and had opened up the earliest file, which was... a journal entry? A digression in a laboratory notebook? The Nirai version of a love letter?
The entry began harmlessly enough, with a stylized doodle of an emblem Hemiola had never encountered before, a ringed planet accompanied by a bird in flight. Pencil, at a guess. It could even see the faint eraser marks where the entry’s author had corrected the planet to make it more perfectly round.
I saw the girl again on the way to class, said the elegant columns of handwriting, neatly aligned to a grid of dots. I gave her the rest of my flatbread. She needed it more than I did. During lunches in the cafeteria, the other cadets throw away enough food to feed an army of girls like her.
The author had followed this with three different recipes for flatbread, detailed tasting notes, and cost comparisons.
“What are you looking at?” Jedao said, peering over his shoulder.
“The very first entry,” Hemiola said. It didn’t have a date, but the index implied that everything was in chronological order.
After a pregnant pause, Jedao said, in a flat voice, “That’s Kujen’s handwriting, although not as elegant as it became later. I wonder what he was doing.”
“Feeding a hungry girl?” Hemiola said, wondering what was so difficult about interpreting the passage.
“Yes, but why?”
It couldn’t see the point of the question. “Because she was hungry and he had food?”
Jedao massaged his temples. “I need to think about this. I wonder what else is in here. According to the index, we have a whole library’s worth of notes here. You read faster than I do, so we have a chance. Especially considering how much time we’re going to be spending in transit anyway.”
Hemiola caught itself admiring the doodle. “I wonder what that is,” it said. “I didn’t know the hexarch liked to draw.”
“The old Nirai emblem, before they replaced it with the modern voidmoth. He told me once he learned draughtsmanship the old-fashioned way, before all this grid assistance business. Showed me a collection of T-squares and compasses and ellipse templates. Although by the time I knew him, he could draw circles damn near perfect freehand. It must have been required in the Nirai curriculum once.” His mouth pulled up on one side. “He scared me once by telling me the Shuos used to require their cadets to speak in code for an entire semester. Or maybe that was the Andan, back before the Shuos split off from them, I can never remember.”
Jedao shook his head. “Some of this material is bound to get technical. I can handle mathematics if necessary”—again that note of irony—“but I’m no engineer.”
“Neither am I,” Hemiola said. “I don’t suppose—?”
“I’m hardly a gate mechanics specialist,” 1491625 said from the pilot’s seat, “although we have some textbooks and what Jedao says is a truly terrible interactive tutorial.”
“Well, we’ll have to make the most of it,” Jedao said.
“How fast do you read?” Hemiola said.
“I can read 200 words per minute of this kind of text. Assuming there aren’t secret codes hidden in the recipes. Which is a possibility with someone like Kujen.”
“All right,” Hemiola said, “would you rather read from the beginning, or take the more modern material?”
“More modern material,” Jedao said after a pause. “On the grounds that I need to know where he is now, not what he was up to almost a millennium ago.”
It calculated the dividing line. “Start with that file, then,” it suggested.
Jedao called up the relevant file. “Works for me. If anything interesting comes up, flag it for my attention. For whatever values of ‘interesting’ seem useful to you.” He settled in to read.
Hemiola did likewise. It was prying. It knew it was prying. Yet it couldn’t help warming to the hexarch. Whatever Jedao found disturbing about the incident recounted in that first entry, surely taking care of a hungry child was laudable?
“Do people still go hungry in the hexarchate?” it asked as it turned to the next entry.
“They probably do now,” 1491625 said with a cynical greenish flicker. “In the past, less so, unless you lived right up against some battle. Which describes a lot of places these days.”